Quizas un poco tarde en el dia para poner este video celebrando el dia de San Patricios, pero justo lo encontre. Simboliza algo significante en cuanto a la cuestion de la hibridez cultural en general y en la vida de yo mismo. Asi que, esto es para mis parientes mexicanos e irlandeses. Orale!
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Note to reader:
I wrote this piece about six weeks ago and submitted it to the “humor” page of a prestigious magazine that deals with important cultural and historical issues in the United States. Their announced acceptance/rejection time line has passed so I’m guessing that it wasn’t quite as “genial” as the writer’s guidelines advised it should be. But I will let you, the reader, decide if I need to work on my geniality.
This is also a prelude to a piece I’ve been working on in my head for the past few days dealing with another “scientific” study that finds self-control is also contagious. I don’t know if that piece will be satirical, but it will be critical in a thoughtful, creative way. (I hope.)
Enjoy… Continue reading
I’ve been trying to sort my thoughts this morning. I feel like writing something, need to write something.
Organize the chaos of sentiments. Assert my rational capacities over and against my dark irrational self.
I’ve been trying to understand suicide recently: Continue reading
Maybe I’m being unfair, too hard on him, expecting too much for a man of color, the first to be the President of a nation that continues to be in denial about its history of institutionalized racial inequality. (Tea Party anyone?)
Maybe I should be like others who give him a break for trying to be fair-minded with his political and cultural opponents in an attempt to change the way politics are done. (As Rodney King asked post-police beating, “Can’t we all just get along?”)
Maybe I should agree with him and, implicitly, his handlers–those cagey strategists who so expertly read the opinion/political/historical tea leaves to shape such a pathetically limited vision for the candidate of “hope”–whose incremental style is supposed to make Obama “not-Bush” and “not-Clinton” in order to create the conditions for a profound presidential legacy. (Not!)
Okay.
Enough snide sarcasm. Continue reading
Since I watched controversial Russian ice dancers Domnina’s and Shabalin‘s faux Australian aboriginal folk routine earlier this week during the 2010 Olympics “original” ice dance competition, I have been thinking about how the cultural “other” is imagined and enacted to reproduce notions of cultural authority and power.
More specifically, I have addressed in other essays on my blog the importance of the culturally imagined/defined body as a site of colonization and imperial control. Indeed, the body as an experienced reality is simultaneously a metaphor that is ideologically mapped with value and power in cultural, economic, and political/ideological terms. It would be difficult to dispute the assertion that fundamental to any examination of social and ideological relations of power, bodies and the way they are imagined would be at its center implicitly, if not explicitly. Continue reading
In a recent blog I wrote critically about the fearful tendencies I experienced growing up in a conservative white community as a biracial child. I drew the parallel of my own experience to current U.S. president Obama’s seeming need to be “nice” and respectful, to avoid confrontation for fear offending anyone, especially the real and imagined power of the white “master.” The underlying need to be liked, I suggested, had/has a racial component whose content is a constant sense of inferiority which exhibits itself in unconscious ways such as pandering and self-deprecating behavior–i.e., submission as in tail between one’s legs behavior–in order to deflect scrutiny of one’s racialized self.
So, for me, it was nice to hear and see Obama’s assertive management of disrespectful Republicans and cowardly Democrats in the healthcare “summit” yesterday. Continue reading
“I have a lot of work to do, and I intend to dedicate myself to doing it. Part of following this path for me is Buddhism, which my mother taught me at a young age. People probably don’t realize it, but I was raised a Buddhist, and I actively practiced my faith from childhood until I drifted away from it in recent years. Buddhism teaches that a craving for things outside ourselves causes an unhappy and pointless search for security. It teaches me to stop following every impulse and to learn restraint. Obviously I lost track of what I was taught.”
Tiger Woods
From his public statement today:
2-19-2010 Continue reading
(I found this piece while searching for up-to-the-minute news on the internet about Tiger Woods. For people who want to know, indeed, who need to know, this will answer all your questions about our last, great [brown] hope. Prepare to be stunned into pure goofiness by the following revelations! Above all, enjoy and “learn something,” as my father likes to advise me.)
By Doscats
February 18, 2010
ALGÚN LUGAR, Arizona. In a stunning reversal of metaphorical meaning, Doscats Investigations reports that forensic linguists, cultural symbologists, and historical semiologists have discovered what appears to be the remains of Tiger Woods’ body embedded superficially on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine. Continue reading
I found a new website some time ago titled JacksonPollock.org that allows users to create their own computer art using a “drip” method reminiscent of Jackson Pollock’s. I haven’t spent much time with it, but tonight I dropped some virtual paint in a smashing piece titled “Watch the Bouncing Ball.”
Enjoy! Continue reading
This past Sunday I read in the NY Times “internet” section about a social/dating website called okcupid.com. It was started by four mathematicians who were dissatisfied with all the other social networking/dating websites. They did some number crunching to figure out what really works in successfully finding and starting friendships and relationships and it wasn’t cute, flirty compliment crap which I detest, but stuff that initiates a conversation.
On that note I have my doubts about experiencing any “conversations” on the site–I’m not not much of a texter, IMer, chatterer, etc.–but I really like the openness of the site including all the fun little questions one can answer to refine values, interests, and limits and quirky and bizarre tests to gauge one’s personality, perspectives, and so on. And one doesn’t even have to necessarily contact a person of potential interest; one is notified who has looked at one’s profile. So there are a variety of options for engagement which is unusual for a “free” site like this even though there is a premium (paid) membership which I’m unlikely to pursue. Continue reading